I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

I really enjoyed her fiction work, so in comparison, this collection of essays seems fairly bland. It’s okay if you want to read the musings of a young, single white American woman living in New York City, but it’s nothing groundbreaking, distinctive or even particularly memorable. There’s some humor to it, but I didn’t find it laugh out loud funny. Passable entertainment.

Best to stay away from Gulag memoirs, then. Or indeed most of Soviet history. Food is something of an obsession in many of them. (Of course, in contrast to me, most people have no trouble at all staying away from books about Soviet history.)

I don’t remember having this problem with Solzhenitsyn. I did quite enjoy Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, which didn’t give me that problem either, tho I think I was obsessed with steak frites at the time due to reading a memoir of life in France just before.